Star Wars Destiny pits characters from the sci-fi saga against one another in fast-paced tactical battles.
Photograph: Owen Duffy for the Guardian

Welcome to our monthly roundup of the best new board games. This month, we’ll be fighting desperate battles in the Star Wars universe, confronting deadly diseases in 19th-century Spain, battling for first place in a prestigious cycling race and leading warring clans in medieval Scotland.

Star Wars Destiny

Star Wars fans have been treated to a Jabba-the-Hutt-sized selection of board games over the years, from the tense and tactical dogfights of the X-Wing Miniatures Game to the frankly inexplicable Star Wars Monopoly. Now there’s a new offering from a galaxy far, far away: Star Wars Destiny, which hands players control of bands of characters from the original films before throwing them into a deadly battle of wits using cards and dice.

Before the game begins, each player assembles their squad of characters as well as a deck of cards representing the allies, equipment and tactical ploys that will guide them towards victory. Different cards interact with one another in different ways, and the ongoing process of building, testing and refining your deck is a big part of the game’s appeal.

This will be familiar to anyone who has played similarly geeky card games like Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone or Android Netrunner, but what sets Destiny apart is the pace at which battles play out. Where other card games can feel like an exercise in grand strategy, it feels more like one of the heart-pounding action sequences from the Star Wars movies. The split turn structure, with players alternating taking one action at a time, gives the feeling of a furious back-and-forth struggle, and a handful of dice determine how well your characters perform at any given moment, forcing both players to react to a rapid-fire succession of unpredictable events.

While the goodies-vs-baddies starter sets give you enough cards and dice to try the game out, you’ll need to buy add-on packs if you want to build your own personalised decks. But it means that you can expect regular releases of new cards adding more characters and tactical options, and for Star Wars fans this is an adrenaline-fuelled and faithful take on the lasers-and-lightsabers epic.

Released in 2008, the best-selling cooperative game Pandemic casts players as a team of medics working to eradicate diseases from cities around the globe. It’s a slick, tense and challenging experience, and over the years it has spawned a series of spinoffs.

Pandemic Iberia is the latest addition to the lineup, set in 1848 with the nascent forces of medical science locked in a battle with cholera, malaria, yellow fever and typhus across Spain and Portugal. It’s visually gorgeous, with stunning artwork, a board that looks like an old vellum map and some striking Moorish-inspired graphics, and at its heart it plays similarly to the original Pandemic.

There are some big changes, though. Rather than jetting around the world, you’ll have to travel by ship and build railway connections between cities to make your way across the map. And while the limitations of 19th-century medicine mean you don’t have the power to eradicate diseases outright, you’ll attempt to slow their spread by purifying water supplies in different areas of the board.

There’s also a new cast of characters, each with their own special abilities, and alternate game modes that see panicked citizens flooding towards hospitals, or individual diseases behaving in different ways, forcing you to adapt your tactics to defeat them.

It’s a powerful combination, and it’s hard to find anything about Pandemic Iberia to criticise, although at almost £50 it’s quite an investment. If you’re not already a fan of the Pandemic series then the original game is a better place to start. But for seasoned players, this is a brilliant new spin on a modern classic.

Full disclosure: This game’s co-designer Matt Leacock once paid for the use of some of my photography.

Schotten Totten

Schotten Totten is a quick and clever card game about warring Scottish clans. Photograph: Owen Duffy for the Guardian

2 players, 15 minutes, RRP £11.99Designer: Reiner Knizia

Recently republished with updated artwork, 1999 card game Schotten Totten sees rival Scottish clans compete to snatch land from one another by moving the boundary stones between their two villages. The game begins with nine stones up for grabs, and players take turns laying cards against them to establish a superior claim and seize them for their side.

Each card comes with a number and a colour, and certain combinations are more powerful than others. As the game plays out, you’ll attempt to build stronger three-card sets than your opponent against each stone, and the whole process feels a bit like playing nine simultaneous rounds of poker.

It is less complicated than it sounds, but the game’s real challenge comes from the fact that you and your opponent will both be drawing new cards from a shared deck. There’s no way of knowing what you’re going to draw, or what your opponent might already have in their hand, and it means that while Schotten Totten is an engaging, constantly evolving puzzle, it’s also about bluffing and misdirection.

It’s a tight, elegant, quick fix of head-to-head brainy competition that squeezes a lot of thoughtful gameplay out of a simple set of rules. At £12, there’s really no excuse not to own it.

Named after the red flag used to mark the final kilometre of a cycling race, Flamme Rouge puts players in control of a team of riders in a competition that’s similar to but legally distinct from the Tour de France. The game comes with a stack of interlocking road sections that can be assembled to form different tracks, and you’ll control cyclists represented by toy-like plastic miniatures. It scores serious points for presentation, but it also attempts to capture the essence of a real-world road race.

You’ll take charge of two cyclists: a rouleur, who moves at a steady pace, and a sprinteur, who specialises in aggressive bursts of speed. Each rider comes with a corresponding deck of cards, and on every round you’ll draw four at random from each deck, choosing one to play and returning the rest to the bottom of the pile to be re-drawn later in the game. Cards move your riders a varying number of spaces along the track, but you won’t always want to play the fastest cards available. Use a slower card on a downhill section of the track and you’ll gain a speed boost. Play a fast card on an uphill stretch and you’ll suffer a penalty to your movement.

Then there’s exhaustion. If your rider finds themselves at the head of the pack, they’ll be forced to add low-speed cards to their deck representing physical strain. It means that for much of the race you’ll want to actively avoid taking the lead, hugging your opponent’s rear wheel and letting them tire themselves out before the decisive dash to the finish line.

It’s a nice concept, but after a few rounds it starts to feel a little flat. You’re repeating the same process again and again, and while perfecting your tactics and timing is a challenge, it feels like the game would benefit from a little more variety. Given the choice, I’d rather play the excellent motor racing game Automobiles, which uses some similar ideas but injects quite a bit more depth.

What have you been playing this month? Are you giving any games as Christmas presents? Let us know in the comments below.

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